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Sales really dropped off since last weekend so I started a 5% extra off coupon with my 15% off sale.
Also in news this week on Ebay, Ebay and others are threatened by agentic AI shopping because they will lose their leverage to make us pay extra for listing placement. So they are blocking that traffic. https://www.valueaddedresource.net/ebay-bans-ai-agents-updates-arbitration-user-agreement-feb-2026/
Store newsletter results – announcing sale:
Your summary
Nov 01, 2025 – Jan 30, 2026
868Total reach
46.43%Open rate
1.5%That is probably me opening it. LOL. Unfortunately it sent this multiple times for some reason. I manually went in and canceled it.
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</div>@timo this is my store link. https://www.ebay.com/str/retrodecormore I totally revamped my categories and considering further dividing with subcategories. I really need to scare up some better featured photos. I’m not making a video, which is the last step to “complete your store.” I created my logo and my banner for free on Ebay. The simple banner doesn’t look great on desktop but looks good on mobile.
19 listings. Seems to be my average weekly these days. Better than my old average I guess. I got a few linens listed but got sidetracked again with listing other things.
PS. I did send newsletter announcing this week’s perma-sale. Ebay chooses the listings shown, which was definitely not what I would have picked to feature.
My store front isn’t great and I don’t look around in others’ stores. It was easy to create except that I manage it on desktop and got lazy with adding photos that I didn’t grab from stock listings since the rest are in my phone.
I think you can have up to 300 categories. I have just made the number that makes sense for my types of items, about 14 categories for 850 unique listings. I feel like it may have been better to create subcategories under vintage vs modern but I’m not going to get into that. I’m not sure how that would look on a phone.
Interestingly, the Ebay reviewer could not see my traffic page. He had me look and tell him. I was surprised how many hits if it was just 30 days. It is super rare for people to use the shopping cart and buy multiple items.
Awesome. It’s so interesting since this was not what they said would happen at Ebay Open.
I spent some time redoing and consolidating my Ebay store categories. Everything was a hot mess in the wrong category and I had created a few that aren’t really a big part of my store.
I also have my shipping policies all cleaned up. I sent out a newsletter to all of my groups with a sale announcement. Hard to tell if that helped or not but I had a few sales since then. I also listed too.
Working on sorting unlisted inventory today.
Store review update. Had the same guy, he was great.
Looking at my numbers, he mentioned that the items I had on flat rate shipping under a pound had started moving better. We discussed going in and changing more stale things under a pound to that shipping policy. I’m a bit nervous about using a flat rate 2 pound – if it’s high enough to cover me, then I feel like I might lose West Coast buyers.
He suggested not putting vintage 70s until the end of the title. He was stronger on that today than at the last meeting. That will be an easy way to refresh old listings as I often put it at the front. Again, the 6-7 photos thing – I didn’t spend much time going back over old listings.
He liked that I tried the coupon, though I had not done the newsletter. They recommend doing the newsletter every 30-45 days and a coupon every 30-60 days. He suggested freshening my store displays every 30 days – traffic page shows I had over 300 visits to the store in the last 90 days. I will likely keep that seasonal though. Over on the social media page, he showed me you can create Instagram posts there. My Pinterest link had also broken. He reports that after 8-10 social media posts sellers see results.
I didn’t use his clearance category suggestion. Even though some old stuff had sold on other platforms (which really may have helped my velocity, though he didn’t confirm that), he still wants me to try refreshing a few old items and putting them in a clearance category. I would then change the view from Ebay categories to my homemade store categories. I tried to get him to reveal something about stale items dragging down your store, but he didn’t really latch onto that.
I also talked with him about the new promoted attribution rules. He said he wished they would have done a more gradual rollout of that. He said I was smart to keep promoting. I told him I would consider on some older used items using the 6-7% but I wasn’t sure that would really give me much more exposure. Without directly confirming this, he basically said keep as is.
I also told him that I was going to set the software to refresh listings every 90 days once the oldest ones are caught up. He stuck with the party line and said Ebay doesn’t want you to do that, and the party line is that 90 days is the “sweet spot” for selling a listing. The Vegas rep was much more direct though.
PS tomorrow I have part 2 of my Ebay store review. Hopefully I will get the same guy. He was pretty candid and didn’t really push the advertising. I’m wondering if he will say anything about promoted listings.
Listed 18 items and I have some ready to go except photos. I forgot that I listed about 6 pillows, which have been hanging around and taking up a lot of space. It felt so good to finally get those listed.
Adding some things:
I had business policies including the flat rate packaging. I’m working to eliminate those since I offer smartpost and Fed Ex on my default. I don’t think the pricing is good any longer for priority.
I made another appointment with for listings review with Ebay. I need to consider going back and adding photos or repeating photos on some listings. I am skipping a clearance category since some old stuff is selling off on Poshmark and Mercari and I have just about all of my store cross posted now.
I will try the Nifty AI listing from a photo and see how that goes. They don’t have an app, but have mobile function on their website.
Yes, I’m going to follow your advice and tackle my death piles! The last few times I popped into the thrift store, the pickins were slim and also overpriced, so not too tempting. I plan to stick to the flea market, which is some Thursdays. I don’t know if I have any categories where for parts applies but I’ll take a look.
